Alabama

Sledge: Authors share tales of real-world labors

Years ago, I negotiated with a big Virginia publishing company about writing a local history of a little Tennessee town. Perhaps the representative could hear the rising excitement in my voice as I contemplated actually getting paid for interesting work, because she hastily interrupted me with, “I mean, don’t quit your day job or anything!”

What writer hasn’t heard those words? Whether from a spouse, a parent, a friend, or a clear-headed publisher on the other end of a telephone line, they’ve been oft-delivered lest the starry-eyed wordsmith become too enmeshed in the ridiculous fantasy that he can put bread on the table by his pen alone.

Eastern Shore literary impresario and author Sonny Brewer has certainly heard them, and so have a passel of his writerly friends, whom it has been Brewer’s inspired idea to corral on the subject. He is the editor of “Don’t Quit Your Day Job: Acclaimed Authors and the Day Jobs They Quit” (MP Publishing, $25), which presents short, original essays by 23 contributors, including Rick Bragg, Pat Conroy, Connie May Fowler, Tom Franklin, Tim Gautreaux, William Gay, Winston Groom, Silas House, Suzanne Hudson, Cassandra King, Daniel Wallace and more. “Tell me how those day jobs you quit inform your art these years later,” Brewer asked these distinguished people. He got a variety of responses, some cleaving closer to the stated theme than others but all of them interesting and enlightening.

No one who has read Rick Bragg’s luminous memoir “All Over But the Shoutin’” will be surprised to learn that his early working life was among the toughest. “The first job I had with the crew was cleaning the mud and roots from bulldozer tracks when I was about ten years old,” he writes. “The giant yellow machines would growl and churn through the red clay, unstoppable, until their tracks got all gummed and choked up with debris.” As to how this kind of back-breaking toil informed him as a writer, he declares, “The pick-and-shovel work I did informed me there was an easier way to make a damn living.”

The variety of work experience on offer here is suitably broad and entertaining. For example, as a callow youth Pat Conroy found himself in downtown Omaha conducting a census for the Roman Catholic Church. “I stumbled into my first whores and pimps that initial day out on the streets,” he writes. “The pimp was dressed with such flamboyance that I laughed when I saw him getting out of his high-priced car.” That led to a confrontation, then a conversation (Conroy is nothing if not brilliant with people) and the discovery that the pimp was a fellow South Carolinian, which led to an introduction to the “girls.” Pimps, apparently, take pride in their work too.

John Grisham writes of getting caught in an after-hours bar fight while hanging out with his asphalt crew. “Pool cues were snatched from the racks and flung about. Beer bottles were thrown and broken. Heads were cracked, people screamed and cursed. For a split second, I thought about hitting someone, but I wasn’t sure who, and for what? Which side was I on?” Winston Groom also got caught in a confrontation, only a much bigger one, while he was a reporter for the Washington Star. When he and a buddy went down to Fourteenth Street to investigate “something going on,” it proved to be a major urban riot sparked by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. “The cops looked at us like we were crazy,” he recalls. “ ‘Get the hell out of here,’ they said. We had our press cards around our necks. We told them we were there to cover the riot. ‘You damn fools, can’t you see what’s happening here?’ one sergeant said. ‘We’re trapped. They’re setting fire to the patrol cars down the street!’ ”

Among the best selections is “Hiding Out With Holden Caulfield” by Suzanne Hudson, who relates her experience as a middle-school English teacher and counselor. “I am a grateful and wounded resident of middle school world,” she explains, where “crude, tasteless, base immaturity” rule. Hudson’s piece is a heartfelt and wise meditation on a day job that infuses her being and point of view almost completely (but not always) to the good.

Henry James once said that many people were vouchsafed extraordinary experiences in life, but only a few were blessed with the ability to competently relate them to the rest of the world. In “Don’t Quit Your Day Job,” the experiences — whether simple, profound, funny, colorful, dangerous or tragic — and this ability are met, with pleasing results.

Sonny Brewer will be at Fairhope’s Page & Palette Bookstore on Thursday from 6 to 8 p.m. Call 928-5295 for more information.

John Sledge edits the Press-Register’s Books page. He may be reached at the Press-Register, P.O. Box 2488, Mobile, AL 36652.